Fisk, Crawford coal plants had long history, as did battle to close them

At their debut in the early part of the last century, the Fisk and Crawford coal plants were hailed as electrical marvels that propelled Chicago's growth.

When their boilers were shut down last week, they ended as symbols of coal's toxic legacy, blamed for crippling diseases and environmental destruction.

The plants' last gasps bookend one of the most contentious battles in Chicago history, one that pitted neighbor against neighbor in Pilsen and Little Village, the largely Latino neighborhoods where the coal-fired electric generators are located. A well-funded environmental lobby pushed to close the plants and raised the profile of the battle. For community organizers, the plants also illustrated environmental racism.

"This fight was being watched in the rest of the U.S. and even in places internationally," said Dorian Breuer, an activist with the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization. "The big green groups recognized that the general environmental argument of 'let's just fix climate change' was going nowhere politically. But this fight in Chicago had real drama. You had these people in the neighborhood protesting and screaming at these plants and polluters."

National environmental groups cite the plants' demise as a major victory in a campaign to shutter coal plants around the country. The environmentalists are particularly proud of leapfrogging federal and state legislators who have failed to pass measures to counteract climate change.

"We don't have to wait for Congress,'' said Bruce Nilles, director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign. "If we can shut two coal plants down in Chicago, what is stopping us from methodically going community by community, state by state and achieving the same pollution reductions we would have if we'd passed a climate change bill back in 2010?"

So far, 120 coal plants across the country have been shuttered in the past 11/2 years. While some environmental groups take credit for those closures, competition from abundant and cheap natural gas, and more stringent federal air pollution limits have made those plants more expensive to operate.

Supporters of renewable energy hope to replace coal plants with wind and solar power, but the nation still heavily relies on coal.

"Everybody wants clean air and clean water," acknowledged Douglas McFarlan, a spokesman for Midwest Generation, which owns the Fisk and Crawford plants and is in the process of disassembling them. "We want that as well. How do we do that while sustaining the quality of life we have here in the United States?"

The day the Fisk plant began operating — Oct. 2, 1903, only a decade after electricity debuted at Chicago's World's Fair — some feared it might explode, including its financier, Samuel Insull, according to a "A Spirit Capable," a history of Commonwealth Edison Co.

"If it blows up, I will blow up with it,'' Insull reportedly said, apparently figuring that if the plant's massive boiler blew up, his career was finished anyway. Insull was the forefather of what would become Commonwealth Edison.

Fisk, in what became the Pilsen neighborhood, was a significant step forward because it marked the first time electricity became available on a large scale in Chicago. Until then dynamos supplied electricity to Chicago's Loop and a few wealthy neighborhoods, but most homes were still lighted by gas.

Within three years, what would later become Commonwealth Edison, was supplying 50,000 customers with electricity and double that number by 1909. Four years later that number again doubled. The Crawford plant, built only five miles from Fisk, came online in 1924. Between 1919 and 1929 the utility grew to supply nearly 1 million customers.

Fisk was considered so advanced that during a January 1921 trip to America, Queen Mary and King George V of England popped in to see it and signed their names in a huge visitors' book. In 1912 visitor Thomas Edison had signed the same book, listing his profession as "inventor." Fisk and Crawford's turbines have since been replaced and upgraded many times over.

For decades, Chicagoans in general paid little attention to them. Drivers on the stretch of the Stevenson Expressway that runs southwest through Chicago might recognize Fisk's 450-foot-tall smoke stack. It rises like a flag above Pilsen. Crawford's twin stacks pinpoint Little Village.

Together, the two plants burned 2.5 million tons of coal per year and produced about 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that plays a significant role in climate change, approximately the same amount produced by 800,000 automobiles.

Fisk and Crawford also were two of the Chicago area's biggest industrial sources of lung- and heart-damaging soot and smog. The emissions cost neighboring communities more than $120 million a year in hidden health damages, according an analysis by the National Research Council, a public policy think tank.

While some neighborhood residents suspected the plants were causing health problems, they lacked evidence to prove their case.

That changed in December 2000 when a Harvard School of Public Health study linked emissions from the plants to 41 premature deaths, 550 emergency room visits and 2,800 asthma attacks annually. Harvard decided to study Illinois' nine fossil-fuel power plants because of their proximity to large populations. Pilsen and Little Village were among the nation's densest populated neighborhoods near coal plants.

"It was somewhat revolutionary to be able to attribute a certain number of deaths to a certain coal plant,'' explained Faith Bugel, senior attorney with Chicago's Environmental Law and Policy Center. At that time Bugel was focused on trying to prevent coal generating plants from being built.

When a Sierra Club campaign successfully challenged a permit for a proposed coal plant in Kentucky, environment groups coalesced around a national campaign against dirty coal. "To go after coal-fired power plants is to pick off one of the biggest culprits of pollution," Bugel said.

In Little Village, Kimberly Wasserman was drawn to the fight, when, as single mom in 1998, her 3-month-old son, Anthony, began gasping for air. In a panic, she called a friend to take her and her baby to Rush University Medical Center where she was told he had suffered an asthma attack.

The doctors asked: Did anyone else in her family have asthma? Had she been using harsh cleaning products before the attack? No, she told them.

Afterward, Wasserman researched her son's disease, and learned that pollution can trigger asthma attacks. The Crawford plant, one of the city's biggest polluters, was less than a mile from her house in Little Village.

Coincidentally, her parents helped found the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, a neighborhood nonprofit, but until her son's diagnosis she had avoided the group.

Carrying Anthony in a baby sling, she started knocking on doors and met children with far worse asthma than her son's, children who needed to breathe with the aid of oxygen tanks and others who weren't allowed to play outside when ozone warnings were in effect.

"I had a lot in common with people in my neighborhood," Wasserman said. "They genuinely cared for me and my child, and that made me want to care for them.'' She recalls holding a nebulizer over Anthony's face "for Lord knows how many hours," as air and medicine filled his lungs.

In 2002, Wasserman's group aligned with another environmental organization in Pilsen and three other smaller groups. Their goal: to collect enough signatures to get a referendum on the 2003 ballot asking City Hall for an ordinance that would force Fisk and Crawford pollution to be reduced by 90 percent by 2006 or be shut down.

The effort marked Wasserman's introduction to Chicago politics, and in retrospect illustrated the group's naivete. While enough signatures were collected, the groups hadn't lined up support from their own aldermen, Danny Solis in Pilsen and Ricardo Munoz in Little Village. Without the blessings of those aldermen, other aldermen wouldn't support them either.

Neither Solis nor Munoz returned calls for this article.

"As a community, how do you go against the coal (plant) company?" Wasserman recalled thinking. "How do you get the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency?"

The grass-roots organizations also were struggling to get attention from large national green organizations working on statewide environmental issues.

The large groups would occasionally work with the neighborhood organizations when they needed to have a press conference so they could say, "Here's the poor brown little community members," Wasserman said, "but they never really gave us an understanding of how the legislation they were working on was impacting our community."

In December 2006, however, that work became clear. The big greens and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration orchestrated a deal calling for Midwest Generation to significantly reduce smog, soot and mercury pollution produced by its six coal-fired power plants in Illinois, including Fisk and Crawford. Midwest Generation purchased the plants as part of a $4.8 billion deal with Commonwealth Edison in 1999. Midwest pledged to sharply reduce mercury emissions by 2009, nitrogen oxides by 2012 and sulfur dioxide by 2018.

Midwest Generation kept its word, pumping millions of dollars over the next several years into pollution-control equipment. Its mercury controls were among the first in the country.

Since 1999, Midwest Generation has reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide by 30 percent, nitrogen oxide by 60 percent and mercury by more than 90 percent at Fisk and Crawford. And the soot that comes out of its plants, while significant, represents just 1 percent of the particulate matter in Cook County, according to commissioned studies.

But the activists in Little Village and Pilsen weren't satisfied, demanding the plants be closed. Their reasoning: There were no controls to cut heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions and the plants would continue to emit other pollutants.

In 2010, after efforts for a climate change bill failed in Washington, the national campaigns became more interested in Chicago. At the same time, Wasserman and the other smaller organizations recognized they needed the larger green organizations on their side if they were going to force the coal plants to shut. At first it was an uncomfortable marriage.

Wasserman knew the fight in Pilsen and Little Village was an ideal example of what some refer to as environmental injustice, but she didn't want her community used by the national environmentalists and then abandoned.

Christine Nannicelli, an organizer with Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, acknowledged that tensions often ran high among members of the coalition. But working in alignment with community organizations was working better than what they had tried in the past. The two sides needed each other.

The dozen or so groups that formed the Chicago Clean Power Coalition hashed out a memorandum of understanding that would ultimately lead to one of the most successful environmental coalitions in the nation, setting ground rules that ensured that every member of the group would be a part off the decision-making process. Today, more than 50 organizations are at that table.

In 2006, Wasserman's second son, not yet 2 years old, also was diagnosed with asthma. Five years later, Peter literally became the poster child for Sierra Club's ads: "Chicago's coal-burning power plants have a new filter. His name is Peter," one ad states, with a photograph of a coal plant opening onto another photograph of Peter breathing from an inhaler. His face appeared on billboards and at train and bus stops.

The environmentalists were fighting for what they called the "Clean Power Ordinance." Only, in this iteration, the city would force Fisk and Crawford to convert to natural gas, cut operating hours or shut down within four years.

Activists in Little Village managed to get Munoz on board in August 2010 after threatening to picket outside his house and papering the neighborhood with information about donations totaling $35,475 he received from Midwest Generation.

But even in late 2010 and early 2011, Solis still wasn't supporting the local groups, and then-Mayor Richard M. Daley wasn't listening to them either. In April 2011, as the Daley administration was winding to a close, two Chicago City Council committees put off votes on the controversial ordinance.

"The institutions of Chicago were really crushing the people down," recalled Kelly Mitchell, a 27-year-old Greenpeace campaigner who lives in Edgewater. "As clear as the evidence was that this coal plant was causing health problems in the city, was contributing to climate change, at that moment the City Council couldn't find the conviction to hold the company accountable for that pollution."

Environmentalists decided to make their frustration known. At dawn on May 24, 2011, Mitchell and seven other Greenpeace activists carrying house paint, warm clothes and food jumped the fence at Fisk, and they climbed the plant's 450-foot smoke stack. Mitchell even brought her cellphone so she could conduct press interviews during her ascent.

For 27 hours, the activists clung to the stack and painted "Quit Coal," in vertical letters. Their actions, captured in photographs and video, brought the issue before thousands of Chicagoans.

Midwest Generation countered by saying environmentalists exaggerated the impact of the coal plants and failed to mention that the company had spent millions of dollars to meet environmental regulations that were more stringent than federal standards.

With Daley retiring, the environmentalists suddenly saw a chance to turn the tide in their favor. In advance of a mayoral candidate forum planned for January 2011 and hosted by Sierra Club and other environmental groups, the Clean Power Coalition made sure Crawford and Fisk were on the agenda.

With Rahm Emanuel a favorite among voters, the coalition spent the weeks leading up to the forum lining up support from his opponents so that if Emanuel didn't come out in favor of closing the plants, he would risk standing out on the issue.

The tactic worked. His opponents all said they would shutter the plants if elected and Emanuel, according to Sierra Club, promised publicly to "address the issue" if elected.

Tom Alexander, a spokesman for Emanuel, said the mayor was clear from the outset that he intended to see the plants cleaned up or shut down. "He worked to realize that, and the surrounding communities are better for it," he said.

The ordinance didn't have the votes needed to pass without the support of Solis, the Pilsen alderman. Tension grew to the point where some residents in the tightknit neighborhood refused to shake his hand. Others joined in a 24-hour vigil outside his offices at Oakley and 23rd Street, where activists handed out fliers showing that the alderman's campaign had received about $50,000 in campaign donations since 1996 from Midwest Generation.

When the re-election votes came in, Solis missed winning outright and found himself in a runoff.

Then the Service Employees International Union said that unless Solis changed his mind on Midwest Generation, they wouldn't support him.

The Pilsen environmental group brought in one of Solis' campaign supporters and explained its plans to blanket the 25th Ward with leaflets.

"We turned to this guy and we said — take what we said about our plans for the next three weeks. You tell him we are going to ensure that he doesn't win the election," Breuer said.

At that point, the coalition had about a third of the aldermen supporting the ordinance. Then Solis announced he would support the campaign.

"It was overnight, when Danny announced publicly that he was on board, everybody flipped," said Jerry Mead-Lucero, an organizer with the Pilsen environmental organization.

On Feb. 28, the news broke just before midnight: Crawford and Fisk would shut down under an agreement brokered by Emanuel. The fight was over. There would be no ordinance.

Environmental groups scrambled to pull together a press conference outside the Fisk plant. Wasserman, who awoke to a bout of laryngitis, sobbed with joy as Nannicelli pulled her in for a celebratory hug.

Wasserman couldn't read the speech she had prepared. Her son, Anthony, spoke instead as she held the microphone to his mouth. The 14-year-old told supporters the deal was a long time coming and thanked the organizations that supported the fight for "speaking with us, not for us."

For some, the gravity of Fisk and Crawford closing came in the final moments. Some workers were so emotional as they went through the motions of closing the plants that they could barely speak.

Crawford ceased operations Wednesday. The final embers at Fisk burned out Thursday.